The myth of originality began a few hundred years ago, reached its climax with the avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and then receded. Today, we are swept up in a new myth of postmodernism, which demands the recognition that we are all just repeating, collaging, altering, or re-mixing. Nothing is original and everything has been done before. Or has it? Has the location and execution of originality altered? Is it still located in the agent? Is each knowledge maker a unique collagist, creating original styles of re-mixing or merely borrowing from a network of relations? Perhaps each formation of knowledge creates a unique iteration of those relations or perhaps it’s glorified plagiarism.

As researchers, makers and creators of knowledge with interdisciplinary methods, these questions incite us to inquire about what we are doing and how we are doing it. Are we simply revising, rephrasing and regurgitating the good work that has gone before us, or is the work truly original? Does it matter?

Re-Originality is the theme of Concordia’s 2015 Annual Graduate Humanities Conference and a call to reflect on the ways in which we create and position our work.

The conference theme is supported by a reimagining of the traditional conference format with participatory mixers, keynote speakers with a twist and performative soirees.

Potential Topics for Contributions (but not limited to):

Curation

-creative and curatorial practices in the digital age

-new methods of presentation and communication

-the archiving of self

Plagiarism

-positive plagiarism

-appropriation art, copyright, and intellectual property concerns

-theft and homage

-authorship & ownership

-conceptions of property in niche communities

Cultures of Appropriation

-appropriation or appreciation?

-adopting/utilizing non-traditional methods of research or knowledge making

-transculturation

Collage & Remix

-thresholds of creativity, margins of originality

-remix culture

-supercuts, mods, fusions, hybrids

Propose your own panel

-3 person panels with a topic of your choosing

Please send a 300 word abstract (English or French), CV and brief biographical note, including contact and institutional affiliation to humanities.phd@gmail.comno later than Friday, January 16th, 2015. Successful submissions will be notified on January 30th, 2015.

Artists may also include several images (less than five, maximum 72dpi). Please send in a single PDF, RTF, ODF or Word document. Conference information online at http://humanities-phd-gsa.ca

In addition to traditional 15-minute paper presentations, our theme is supported by a reimagining of the normative conference format by also inviting proposals for innovative forms of knowledge sharing such as immersive and interactive workshops, performative or demonstrative presentations, installations and exhibitions, and ‘lightning round’ presentations (5 minutes, 5 slides). Please indicate your preference for one or two of these presentation formats in your submission. If you are interested in presenting a performative demonstration or workshop, please include a paragraph or two about how you envision that working (space, time, logistics, tech needs, etc).

in dialog with performance group:
IF YOU NO WHAT I MEAN: Mayra Morales / Petur Grunansom / Marcelino Barsi / Mona Ayas
Merging powerful optical architectures, compositions of structure born sound, and the aesthetics of chiaroscuro image, ‘F O L D’ envelops the spectator in the performative, theatrical and cinematic experience of self and the other.

‘F O L D’ as a platform for interdisciplinary approaches to ‘performance’ and ‘performative environment’ is a ‘stage of an exhibition’; it’s a ‘cinema’; it’s a ‘concert’ and in one instance we may say it’s a ‘contemporary dance’

RESEARCHERS DEAL WITH INSTITUTIONS on a daily basis, and despite or because of various bureaucracies, the institution is often taken as given. But what of this often silent infrastructure which frames our activity, ideas and intellectual work, making demands of innovation and originality?

While Foucault notes that institutions freeze relations of power, Merleau-Ponty views ‘institution’ dynamically, as a creative force that brings about life. In either conception, institutions are powerful actors. While the word’s Latin root, statuo, gives rise to a number of English possibilities, institution and instituting encapsulate these different registers of noun and verb, static and dynamic, being and becoming.

This annual Graduate conference takes up the question of critical institution, asking how researchers see themselves and their work in relation to these processes of power and control.

How is knowledge constituted and instituted? Philosophy and theory can imbue the institution with life, vitally mediating subjectivity and nature. For Merleau-Ponty, the event of institution implies duration and “the demand of a future.” Knowledge and creation are instituted through a process of investigation, repetition, search and re-search.

Within the arts, as Andrea Fraser notes, historical practices of “institutional critique,” today, seem institutionalized—staid and uncontroversial. Should cultural workers instead, as Irit Rogoff states, “occupy and inhabit [institutions], in ways that can be interesting, critical and inventive?” Or, is it productive, following Fraser, to shift focus to the “institution of critique,” examining “critical claims of legitimizing discourses”? Such a shift may be imperative for practices of research-creation.

These trajectories are already asserted in similar threads of inquiry within activist, queer and feminist histories, posing critical challenges to organizational, social and cultural institutions. Can positing alternate models for new institutions and micro-institutions affect relevant social change? What can an examination of such institutions tell us about power relations in general or academia in particular?

We invite abstracts of 300 words or less in English and French, plus a 100 word biography.

Since 1973, the Humanities PhD Program has served Concordia University as a premier site of innovative research, providing students with opportunities to pursue interdisciplinary projects across fields in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts. In 2007, the Humanities PhD Program became part of the newly created Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. Learn more here: http://cissc.concordia.ca/phdinhumanities/